239. One and Done

Why one and done when it comes to drinking is the dream that leads to deprivation.

Unpacking the Why Behind the Dream

Why do we yearn for that solitary drink? What is it about that one drink that holds such allure? These questions are where we start our journey. It's not about judging ourselves; it's about understanding our motivations and the stories we tell ourselves.

Cue, Craving, Routine, Reward: The Cognitive Model

We explore the cognitive model of cue, craving, routine, and reward. We uncover the intricate dance between these elements when it comes to our relationship with alcohol. From the trigger of being out with friends to the release of dopamine in our brains, we unravel the psychology behind our cravings.

Why One is Never Enough: Unraveling the Chemical Response

Ever wondered why that elusive "one and done" remains out of reach? It's because of the profound chemical responses happening within us. We're demystifying the connection between rewards, dopamine, and our behavior. I invite you to free yourself from any self-judgment and realize that your brain simply associates alcohol with reward.

Natural Pleasures vs. Artificial Rewards

What about natural pleasures and authentic rewards?  We explore the beauty of experiencing wonder, awe, and joy without relying on external substances. From sunsets to laughter with friends, we have countless opportunities to find sustainable, natural rewards that align with our values.

Redefining the Reward

How do you reshape your reward system? By shifting our focus from the routine of drinking to the genuine connections and experiences, we create a more profound and lasting sense of fulfillment. It's about pausing during cravings, re-routing our associations, and finding alignment with our values.

Exploring the Aftermath: The Myth of "One"

Ever noticed how that "one" drink never truly satisfies? We dissect the aftermath of that solitary drink, examining the physical and emotional changes within us. We learn that alcohol's effects often lead us feeling worse than before. It's a thought-provoking exploration that encourages us to question the dream of "just one."

Your Empowered Choice: Understanding Your Journey

Remember that you are on a unique journey. Your relationship with alcohol is yours to define and shape. By understanding the stories we tell ourselves and embracing our powerful intuition, we can make mindful choices aligned with our true desires.

You are beautifully powerful and intuitive, and I am here to support you every step of the way. 

Love, 
Mary

This time of year can be full of joy, but it can also come with extra stress and temptations around alcohol. So, I thought, why not offer something to help bring in a bit more ease and peace?
I'd love to spend this time together with you. I miss you! 
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Transcript

Mary Wagstaff: 1:12

Do you ever feel like you're outgrowing alcohol, that you are longing for a deeper connection to life? If alcohol is keeping you playing small and feels like the one area, you just can't figure out you are in the right place. Hi, my name is Mary Wagstaff. I'm a Holistic alcohol coach who ended a 20 year relationship to alcohol without labels, counting days or ever making excuses. Now I help powerful women just like you eliminate their desire to drink on their own terms. In this podcast, we will explore the revolutionary approach of my proven five shifts process that gets alcohol out of your way by breaking all of the rules, and the profound experience that it is to rediscover who you are on the other side of alcohol, I am so thrilled to be your guide. Welcome to your journey of awakening. Welcome back to the show my beautiful listeners, what is up, I am so thrilled that you're here. I hope whatever kind of day you're having, that this is a bonus and that you are taking care of yourself. And that's kind of how I feel about my podcast is that it's part of your self care routine. And you can think of it like that, too. So today we're going to talk about one and done this is seems to be everybody's dream. I'd love to be able to just go out and have one a drink socially, right? Well, why? Because we're just gonna start right there. We're gonna get right into it. Why do you want to be able to have why is that important to you? And you can just answer that for yourself right now. Right? So why it's important to you is because you have a story about why it's important, right? That it will I want to I can so I can enjoy it. Right? What about what about it? Do you enjoy? What about that one drink? Do you enjoy? And is it true? So you're gonna find out why it's important to be able to have the one drink? And is that reason that you just gave yourself? Is that true? And how do you know? Right? And even if it is true, what is the impact of just one from everything that you've learned on the show, right? The impact of just one is a it's reinforcing that circumstance with that behavior. So the cue, right, the cue being out to dinner with friends, creates a craving. And this is like the model of cognitive behavior from the book. Atomic habits, which is kind of a, he added another layer that wasn't looked at kind of in the traditional model. So he talks about cue craving routine reward. So the cue is going out to drink. And then there's the craving or the desire to have a drink, right? And the routine is to drink. And the reward is the release of the dopamine in your brain. Which leads us to the question why one is never enough. And this is something that you is completely out of your control 100%. So I said, I want you to stop giving yourself a hard time about it. Your brain is telling you, alcohol is a reward. Your brain is like your brain, the brain does that because of the chemical, it's the same thing that happens with sugar. Right? The when there is a chemical release your it signals to your brain, this is a reward, this increase right? It happens when you take any other drug, right? The drug of MDMA, better known as like, ecstasy, right creates huge floods of serotonin in the brain, and it creates this euphoria, right? But is it? Is it really like? How do we get there without it? That's the whole question. Right? And is it possible? And is it creating it mean in any circumstance while it's happening is real? But it's a it's an it's an alteration of the reality right? So there is an an unnatural chemical response. This happens when we you know, we consume social media that's happens when we have sex, right? There's, there's all sorts of ways what ways that this, although I will say with sex, there's that is like a very natural organic part of our experience. And it doesn't have to really come from necessarily an external source. I mean, you can use your imagination and create sensations in your body. But when you're taking in this external stimuli, it is unnatural but your brain is thinks it's a reward. The other ways that we get rewards are through natural things through walking in nature through play. Hang with children, getting a hug. Watching a sunset, right? It creates this wonder and awe we laid out a few weeks ago and watch the meteor showers the Perseids, and that was like, it created a really feel good feeling to be out under the stars laying down in the dark with my family, right. So why one is never enough is because the the act of drinking itself creates a reward that you have no control over, even if it's one. So now that reward is associated with the Q, the queue being out to dinner with friends, right? So you're so when when you take away the routine part of it, and now you just have q, q and craving, and you don't get there and you don't have the routine and you don't get the reward. Right. So what our job to do together is in the coaching experience is that we start to change the routine. And then we start to change the craving and we start to be able to associate a reward with something that's a more natural, that is more in alignment that you don't have to have a push pull experience with that you're not fighting yourself about that's part of your, it's in alignment with your values, right. And the way that we do that is by pausing at that craving, we have to be willing to experience the craving first without receiving that reward so we can start to re route it. And I'm not sure exactly how he talks about it in atomic habits. But this is my interpretation of it is that when when the only reason that you have this, this thought that there that the one that the dream is just one I wish I could just have one, but it's never enough, right? Is because when your body gets that reward, what happens then is it very quickly starts to the dopamine levels start to drop, and they start to drop, even below the baseline of where they were when you started. Because when you're thinking about going out to dinner with friends, you're probably starting to maybe get some dopamine from that natural cue of the alcohol itself. But the but going out with friends and community is actually a natural reward. It's a natural pleasure response. So what happens is we start to associate that natural that cue in that natural pleasure response, right? With the natural reward. So you have to change the routine, you have to eliminate that routine, and then that the craving will start to eliminate because you are associating the cue with something new, you're associating it what we do with we plan ahead of time, and we look for your heartfelt intention. Why are you going out to this dinner? Why is it important to you? Right, because I love being around my friends, they had a client that just said when I'm with my friends, I can see myself I can like see who I am, you know, like I can have this different relationship to self, I love them. This is why I love sacred sisterhood. It's just like, It taps us into this place that's not this achievement based. Or like we can kind of drop all these labels in these roles of who we need to be and just be like organic women, right? And so letting that be the reward and focusing on really listening and being a good listener and remembering things and asking curious questions. When you start to focus on that, then the that middle part of the the craving and the routine starts to change and you still get the reward. Right now the reward might not be that huge spike, but it will be sustainable. A friend of mine just told me and I don't know what the exact statistics are but you know, there's all of this you know, research now about cold therapy doing cold plunges cold exposure or whatever. And that that the dopamine levels of cold exposure are increased just as much as if you use cocaine, except when you use cocaine. The dopamine increase is about nine minutes and then it drops underneath I'm I'd be curious to know what it is for alcohol. I don't even think alcohol gets you that high and it probably takes you down even lower. But then you like come crashing way down from how you felt even before you were doing you know doing the cocaine. But with the cold exposure, the dopamine levels go high ate, and they become very sustained for a long period of time. So the whole point is that is that there are these natural ways that have no consequences. And when you think about the things that you enjoy, they are all associated with alcohol. So it's your job to get back to the natural enjoyment of things and see at this point in my life, do I need to have even one? And why do I need to have one with something I enjoy? And if I don't really enjoy it anymore? Why am I doing it? Right? Why am I continuing to go out to dinner with these friends that I don't really have great conversations with, right? And this does happen, this will happen naturally, where it's like, you're kind of channel one friends, and then the people you want to go deeper with or you make space for new people to come in. And this is all something that you get to decide as being a mature, sovereign woman, right? So you're here, because you are entering a new phase in your life, you are ready to step into your full power, your full authenticity, and really align with your intuition. And like, you know, I know you have powerful intuition, because that's why you're here only beautifully powerful, intuitive. People listen to this podcast, by the way, no, we all have intuition. But people that are kind of two women that are already tuned into that or have been tuned into it or awakening to that and awakening to their feminine are here. But they have this thought that they think is this dream or you do one and done, I wish I could just have one, I wish I could just I'd love to be able to just have a drink socially, right. And not to say that that's not possible. But you want to know why. And you want to know what you're missing out on, because your brain is still focused on that drink. And then when you do just have the one. The whole point is, is that it's a fallacy, right? Like, the body is going to continue to still want to have another one, regardless of your mindset, right, because of the chemical reward. So it doesn't matter. It has nothing to do with being an alcoholic or not being alcoholic, or where you are on the spectrum. Like I don't even think that that word is real or make sense. Because I can teach you how to have one and done and everything that I've talked about in the last few episodes about feeling the sensations in your body and experiencing and honoring and releasing emotions is the exact same thing. So if you want to try to have one and done, and you notice this experience of what it feels like, afterwards, without the story, right, without the story have, I always said I was only gonna have 1am, I going to have one, like you just decide I'm only having one. But I'm gonna get super curious about what it feels like after that in my body. Right? And how I felt before. And there, that is something that you can't do anything about, right? So we either have to accept the alcohol is this chemical that once we put it in our body is completely out of our control. It's not neutral anymore. You can accept that. Yeah, it's so important to me to have this one drink because of this reason. So I'm willing to go through that resistance to just having one, right. And there are probably times where you've just had one because you didn't and you didn't have resistance to to because you probably just didn't really want one and you were feeling tired and you weren't feeling that great anyway. And if you think you know, someone that can just have one and done well think again. Because we don't know their story, right? I mean, I've worked with so many people who hide their drinking like that, just like they don't drink in public, or they drink before they go out or they drink more when they go home. Right, we like literally have no clue. Or there's people that drink that don't really like it. And that's why they can just have one because they feel some sort of social obligation. And it has a different reaction to their body, but then they keep drinking and soon they're wanting more right outside of themselves like outside of their own initial desires. I don't even really like alcohol. I didn't really like alcohol when I was I remember being in high school and everyone drank and I smoked a lot of weed and I remember saying this one where I was like I don't like drinking I don't like getting drunk and my one of my friends being like, oh, that's crazy. And I was like, I don't like that feeling. And you know, whatever life happened peer pressure, whatever it was and I just and then I got addicted. So the biggest question is, why is it important to just be able to have one and is that actually true for you, and then to find out firsthand, the next time you drink, I want you to really take know, how do I feel before I have this drink? Right? And what does it feel like after to have the one now you might have that initial release or that initial relief, right? But especially when you're excited about doing something like think about like going to a concert or going out with your friends, or even a Friday night, having dinner with your partner, or whatever it is, when you're feeling good. Notice what happens after one. Because chances are, you're not going to feel you're going to feel worse than when you started right. So why one and done is possible for you if you're interested in managing your mind around alcohol for ever. So examine this, share this with a friend maybe even do a little experiment. And see, just see what happens. Ask yourself how much better could this experience experience be without the one. I hope you have a great week. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. As much as I know you would love to you cannot wish yourself alcohol free. You have to take action to do something different. So what I want you to do is head on over to my website Mary Wagstaff coach.com, where you can download the free training of the five shifts of intuitive drinking, along with a free guide of questions that you can ask yourself every single day when you have an urge. When you have a craving when you wake up in the morning, you can make it a ritual practice to start to observe yourself in a new way. And it will guide you through the process of learning to tap into your own deeper knowing so that you can develop a new relationship to yourself, which will in turn and your relationship to alcohol. Mary Wagstaff coach.com To register for the free On Demand training right now.